'How Often Should a Company Do PR?' StoryBizz Media Founders Break Down the Consistency Habits, Most Get Wrong

Almost every founder starts a PR strategy with good intentions and abandons it for the same handful of reasons. Not because public relations doesn't work, but because nobody addressed the doubts already sitting in the room before the first press release went out. Here's what we hear most, and what we tell founders back.

At StoryBizz Media, the team works with over 300 clients every month, so these doubts aren't hypothetical, they come up in nearly every onboarding call, in some version or another. Between Anupal Chakraborty's marketing background and Anshul Mishra's parallel performance marketing company, the two have a closer view than most agencies into where PR and marketing actually diverge, which is why StoryBizz treats them as related but separate disciplines rather than interchangeable line items. Here's what their clients ask most often, and how the two of them tend to answer back.

"We don't have news to share every quarter."

Neither does almost anyone. PR strategy doesn't require an announcement, a launch, a raise, a hire. It requires a point of view, and every founder has opinions about their industry nobody's asked them to write down yet.

“PR was never really about the news angle. It's about who controls the narrative when someone searches your name, it's either you're shaping how you're perceived on Google, or someone else is doing it for you, in ways that won't work in your favor,” shares Anupal Chakraborty, Founder, StoryBizz Media.

"We already post consistently on social media, isn't that the same as doing PR consistently?"

It's consistent. It isn't consistent PR. Social content is a channel you own, you write it, you post it, nobody has to agree it's worth covering. Consistent PR runs on placements you don't own: a journalist deciding your perspective is worth their audience's time. One builds a following. The other builds third-party credibility, and a content calendar can't manufacture that alone.

"Owned content proves you can talk about yourself consistently. Earned coverage proves someone else thinks you're worth talking about. Founders confuse the two right up until an investor asks for the second and finds only the first," shares Anshul Mishra, Co-Founder, StoryBizz Media. 

"Marketing is already generating leads, isn't that the better ROI?"

Depends what happens to those leads next. Leads sourced purely through marketing, without consistent PR building trust in the background, tend to carry longer sales cycles and lower close rates. The trust-building still has to happen, it just happens later, inside the sales call, where it costs more than if a journalist had already done it for free.

"Every founder wants more leads. Fewer ask what percentage already trust them before the first call, and that's the number that actually predicts revenue,” says Anshul.

"Why does PR need its own budget if marketing already covers content?"

Because the two buy different things. Marketing budget buys reach you control through impressions, s, followers. PR investment buys credibility you don't control, this includes a journalist's time, an editor's judgment, a podcast host's audience. Folding PR into the marketing line item usually means it's the first thing cut when budgets tighten, because it looks like a content expense instead of a trust-building one.

"When PR shares a budget line with marketing, it always loses the argument in a downturn, content spend shows up in a dashboard, trust doesn't. That's a reporting problem, not a value problem, but it kills PR programs anyway,” addressed Anshul. 

"We tried PR before and it didn't work for us."

Usually true, and usually explained by the same pattern: a burst of earned media around one event, then silence, then the conclusion that PR doesn't work for startups. One campaign was never going to change how the market sees a company. Staying consistent might have.

"When a client tells us PR didn't work last time, we ask how many months apart their last five mentions were. The answer is almost always the actual diagnosis,” recalls Anupal.

"How do we measure PR success, if not by article count?"

Not by counting placements. Real measurement looks at share of voice, that is, the percentage of total industry media coverage your brand commands against competitors, alongside sentiment analysis, which categorizes mentions as positive, neutral or negative to track overall reputation health. It also tracks message pull-through, or how often your key brand messages, taglines and core values actually appear inside the coverage itself, and audience quality and tier, meaning how placements stack up by publication tier, domain authority and relevance to your actual target demographic. As one of our founders puts it, 

"Founders ask for article count because it's the easiest number to report. Share of voice, sentiment and message pull-through are harder to pull together, but they're the only ones that actually tell you if the coverage is working," further adds Anupal. 

None of these doubts are unreasonable. But they're usually answered by staying consistent, not giving up. The businesses earning strong industry trust right now aren't the ones who solved every doubt before they started, but the ones who kept showing up while the doubts were still open.

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